


Reflections

by SilverDagger



Category: Claymore
Genre: Backstory, Dark, Gen, Murder, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1563779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Ophelia ever kills a human, she's fourteen years old, and it's an accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflections

**Author's Note:**

> This should possibly be considered a slight AU, because the idea that inspired it - that maybe Miria and co. weren't the first half-Awakened Claymores, or even the first to figure it out - no longer seems to be canon-compliant, at least assuming the Organization's mad science department is right about things.

The first time Ophelia ever kills a human, she's fourteen years old, and it's an accident.

She doesn't even intend to hurt him, really, or not by much – just the keen edge of a blade across his throat, pressing close, just a little blood and a little fear. He isn't worth losing her head over, anyway, not this weakling thing. Just some merchant's boy with clever hands who thinks the world belongs to him, stupid bastard never had anyone who thought to prove different. But she doesn't mean to kill him, and it's not that her hand slips, either, it's just that she's – _stronger than she should be, this time, faster,_ and she misjudges the distance, doesn't pull back the strike in time to stop her sword from cutting deep into flesh.

She jerks backwards as he falls, the boy she hadn't wanted to kill, feels his blood spray hot across her face, and mostly, right then, mostly she's just frightened. That doesn't stop her from bringing the blade down again, cleaving his chest as she's been taught to do. Her hands tremble as she digs the grave, and later as she scrubs and scrubs her skin until the blood is gone, terrified, muttering imprecations with the taste of salt and copper still on her lips. The river water is cold and swift, washing the red from her arms and beneath her nails, and she's going to have to burn this uniform, and she doesn't want to die.

( _She maybe does, a little._ )

But it doesn't matter what she wants. She can't die. She's got no right to. Not when there are beasts that need killing, things to rend limb from limb for what they do and what they are. And it doesn't matter either what happened earlier – what _almost_ happened, what _didn't_ happen, that doesn't mean anything, because her reflection in the polished copper washbasin outside the trainee barracks is the same as it ever has been. Her eyes are silver, her hair is pale, her skin is skin and not scales and her fingers aren't tipped with burnished claws. She isn't a monster.

She isn't that kind of monster.

She needs to remember that.

*

The second is cleaner, and more deliberate. A snapped neck and he drops like a puppet, strings all cut, barely twitching. No blood this time. She can't decide whether that's a relief or a disappointment. She still isn't sure why she does it, either, except that she doesn't like the way he watched her, like he knew something she didn't, the revulsion in his eyes when it should have been fear. But it isn't difficult to kill him and it isn't difficult to deal with him either, drag the dead weight of him off into wilderness where he won't be found. People disappear all the time, after all, wander off and don't come back. There's no point in going looking.

She's seventeen that year, lean and dangerous, proud of her own strength. The others she trained with are already afraid of her.

She remembers Flora with a blade at her throat, prepared to do what needs must, and how she had apologized but her hands had been steady, unyielding, and Ophelia nothing but a snarl of fear and rage and pain, fighting to hang on. Her first mission, _her first mission_ , and how all of them must have thought her a failure, worthless, weak, to end like that so soon. They were wrong, though. Ophelia is better than that. Stronger. She's always been able to pull herself back from the edge.

She looks down at the dead farmer, sprawled pathetically in the dirt with his head at a funny angle, and thinks about how easy this is. Killing them. Hiding the evidence. Walking away. She kicks him into a shallow grave, covers him over with rich, dark earth and knows that this doesn't mean anything at all.

When she looks up again, the sun is too high and too bright in the sky, and everything smells cleaner than it ought to. She isn't afraid. She has no reason to be afraid. Ophelia knows what she is, and what she isn't, and that's the only thing that matters.

If she ever has to, she knows she can kill Flora herself.

*

She meets the third on the road, reporting back from another mission. He reminds her of her brother, with that stupid, slack-jawed look of his, that idiot smile. She disembowels him with a quick swipe of her sword and leaves the body for the dogs.

*

The first time Ophelia _tried_ to kill a human, she was eight years old.

She doesn't remember much of that time, and she doesn't bother trying. She does remember wandering, dazed and feverish, being small and scared and damnably weak. But when the slave-takers had found her on the road between one village and another, Ophelia had run, but she hadn't run away. 

She remembers the hilt of her brother's knife sticky-slippery in her hand from the man's blood, and how he had taken that from her too, the knife, and the way he had grinned down at her through broken teeth as he told her how very lucky she was that the men in the East paid so highly for undamaged girls.

She wonders sometimes if she'll ever find him again, that man, and how long it will take him to die when she does.

*

After the fourth, she stops keeping count.

It's not like there's much glory in it, anything really worth remembering. Too easy, too quick, and anyway, killing weaklings is nothing like the pleasure of testing herself against Awakened Beings.

There's a folktake she remembers, of a man who had to fight against his own reflection. He summoned it with a spell, and in the end, the only way to kill it was to break every mirror in his house – and even then the thing had followed him, watching from water and the gleam of sunlight on glass. Her brother had told her that story, though she doesn't remember why. There must have been some point to it, of course. Some lesson she was supposed to learn. People don't do things without a reason.

Ophelia remembers smashing the mirror in the last inn she stayed at, the last time she bothered with staying at an inn. The blood had run hot and bright down her hand and down her arm, too pretty for words, but when she brought her fingers to her mouth the taste had been bitter as yoma blood always is, and she doesn't think, in the end, that smashing the mirror had been enough.

*

She goes out hunting on her own these days, whether they order her or not. She's strong enough to handle it, doesn't need anyone else dragging her down, though it's easy enough – when they send some brainless upstart along with her – for low-ranking warriors to die in battle, torn limb from limb or pushed over the limit themselves.

It's her job to kill monsters, and she does.

She doesn't care anymore whether she's injured, or how close she comes to dying. It doesn't frighten her. Not anymore. She likes the rush of violence, the sweet, sharp line between pain and power, and anyway, it's not as if they're exactly _human_.

She isn't either, of course. She knows that.

She supposes it ought to bother her. She thinks it used to – or at least she remembers, sometimes, the feeling of river water up to her elbows, the smell of dirt and the taste of blood and how she had been so much weaker then. Sometimes she tries, and fails, to remember what it's like to be clean.

*

Her own blood or her enemies', it doesn't matter. It all tastes the same.


End file.
